#this is also 100% an excuse for me to briefly succumb to AU brainrot

[blackestnight]

What would their lives be like if they had never met? & What’s their relationship with each other’s families? Do they share a friend group?

okay, i have been agonizing over that first one for way too long, and then i realized i needed to answer the question backwards. because for me the interesting thing is not: how would their lives be different if they didn't meet? it's: what changed in their lives to ensure they never met? and man, the world is a weird and wonderful place and every relationship we have is the result of a hundred thousand impulse decisions and freak accidents culminating in exact right place exact right time exact right person—

so there's a lot of puzzle pieces that can be just out of place.

consider: hanami comes to eorzea, angry and reckless and burning, seeking to soil her hands with garlean blood. she's always been intense, always let her love and her anger mix on her tongue; they come from the same place and she feels them for the same people. the spitting image of her mother, people say about her, and that's true in any life, but in this one maki took her away when she was six summers old, and she grew up straddling two homes, one foot on her family's farm and the other in the training grounds of shinobi-no-sato. the upright thieves of limsa lominsa defend a code that allows for sinking garlean ships: hanami falls in with them, and through them she meets thancred waters, former upright and scion of the seventh dawn. they could use a woman of her talents, he tells her, and she could use their information network. she follows stolen crystal caravans to their hideouts and cuts free prisoners before they're ever tempered; when the waking sands runs red with blood she creeps unseen through castrum after castrum until she finds the scions and spirits them away without a trace; rhitahtyn sas arvina is dead before he ever has a chance to fear for his life and the only sign of her passage is a ripple in the ocean beneath cape westwind. she's a hero in the loosest sense, because shadows cannot afford to be heroes; she cannot be the warrior of light because the warrior of light must be a face, a figurehead, and she cannot sacrifice her greatest weapon. arenvald lentinus, alone and desperate after the raid, follows alphinaud and cid into coerthas, recovers a legendary airship and flies into the heart of a hurricane; arenvald lentinus, in the gleaming plate mail that was a'aba and aulie's last gift to him, leads the charge into the praetorium, the echo-blessed eikon-slayer that garlemald has learned to fear. no one ever suspects that the warrior of light might have a shadow with a name of her own, which suits them both well. arenvald's burgeoning legend of solitary, gleaming hero means his foes will never think to watch their backs, and hanami's viper-quick blade means that he never has to worry about watching his.

or: aymeric de borel has heard the stories, the tall tales of eorzea's champion and her power to peer into the past, to reveal the secrets of men long dead. he corners the elusive iceheart in snowcloak, and when she says echo he knows to trust it, and the truths she tells him shake him to his core—and he wants to trust this magic as much as he wants to trust his cause, and so he begs an audience to confront the archbishop. lucia, who has learned never to trust men who claim to speak with truer voices than gods, is already preparing a prison break before the cell door comes down; estinien, who has already lost one family to fire, takes great pleasure in pinning charibert to the wall with a javelin on their way out of the vault. they stagger into the highlands, fleeing the city they swore their lives to only to have them traded away to pay another debt, and that's where iceheart finds them. come with me, she says, and we'll bring the truth to light, and right the wrongs of antiquity, and they do. by decree of the archbishop the temple knights fall into the care of ser zephirin after the lord commander's betrayal, as his erstwhile chain of command is riddled with heretical sympathizers and cannot be trusted; the scions' greatest admirers have left the holy see, and so while hanami and the survivors of the bloody banquet remain in camp dragonhead and plot the search for their missing friends, they never cross the steps of faith.

or: shomi hagane is a loyal daughter of her house, and will not forsake her duty; her children are privileged to receive an imperial education alongside the prince they're sword to protect, and in the safety of their home she teaches them rebellion. as her oldest daughter hanami is her heir, and hanami takes to her duties like she was born for them, because she was. she stands a silent warning at hien's elbow while he tours the yanxian countryside, yearning for a homeland that was lost before he was ever born, and she whispers her own faded memories of a free doma in his ear. would that i could have seen it myself, he says, and someday soon you could, she says. when kaien leads the samurai of monzen in an uprising hien is there; when zenos cuts down kaien and aims for hien's heart hanami is there. she dies for him like she was born for it, because she was.

or: aymeric greystone knows he is not his father's son, but being a bastard counts for less out here; when he asks his mother she tells him, with a sad smile, that his da was lost to a war before he was born, and she couldn't afford to live in the city without him. by the time he's old enough to work out that she's lying he knows well enough not to ask what she's lying about, exactly, because he knows it will hurt and it all worked out for the best anyway, because his stepfather treats him well and his half-sister is the most precious thing in his world, and they live a good life with their birds in the eastern highlands, and when he's buried under the avalanche of snow and rock from the lesser moon crashing down he's buried with people who love him, which is better than dying a nameless soldier in a drawn-out war like his father did.

or—

you get the point. i like what ifs. i think in the end their meeting was a consequence of the people they are, not the other way around, and missing that meeting would be no more momentous a change than anything else. which isn't to say it's meaningless: it's that every choice is momentous. and relationships are a product of choices.